Dear President Obama,
The time has come for you to take a stand regarding the increasingly brutal and repressive tactics being used to suppress the Occupy protests throughout the country. I assume that you have received briefings regarding these incidents, in which militarized police forces in various cities have clubbed, beaten and pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors, used bulldozers to clear their camps and, most disturbingly of all, denied access to and even arrested reporters attempting to cover the events. Perhaps you have even seen some of the many images of these abuses available on the internet. If not, let me suggest that you watch the now infamous video from the UC-Davis protest in which a police officer cruelly and arbitrarily assaults a group of college students doing nothing more than sitting on the ground. Sir, this is not what the public was hoping for when you were elected. This is not the America people imagined when they worked for your election, donated to your campaign or gathered on that cold, crisp morning to witness your inauguration. I know because I did all of those things, and I did them eagerly, even joyously. But I did not do those things because I wanted a country that was even more intolerant of dissent than it had been under the Bush Administration, or one just as beholden to the narrow interests of Wall Street. And sir, I do not know that I will - that I can - do any of those things again in 2012 as long as this brutality continues.
First, let me establish my bona fides. That should not be necessary, of course. You should listen to every citizen with a legitimate complaint, regardless of what they have done for you. And you are, in any event, sworn to uphold the Constitution, which includes the rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, the freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances, and critically, freedom of the press. Yes, I know that you are familiar with the 1st Amendment, that you once taught Constitutional Law, and that all I have described is simple black letter law. But with all due respect, sir, you seem to have forgotten those fundamental principles in practice, because they are being routinely violated at this very moment throughout the country.
Nevertheless, I recognize that politics is a ruthless, dirty game, even more so today than in 2008 thanks to the Citizens United decision, so let me return to my point. In 2008, my wife and I donated the maximum amounts allowed by law to your campaign during both the primaries and the general election. In fact, I am one of your original supporters and I donated to your 2006 senatorial campaign, despite not living in Illinois, because I hoped even then that you might run for president someday. In 2008, I bundled a large number of other donations, helped to arrange a fundraising event for you, volunteered for your campaign at my own expense in a critical battleground state, wrote letters to the editor on your behalf to newspapers throughout the country, advocated your candidacy to anyone who would listen and, in short, did everything I knew how to do to help ensure your election. After the election, I secured tickets to the inauguration and stood in the cold for hours with my children so that they could witness what I believed would be a watershed moment in American history.
I do not know if you, or anyone in your campaign, will read this letter. I sincerely doubt that you will, or that if you do you will actually care, but I don't know any other way to make my voice heard. I suppose I could wait until you came to town and pay for the privilege of speaking to you, but even then I would probably be ignored. You see, we actually met once, during that fundraiser in 2008, and when I asked you then about restoring the civil liberties that were being systematically eroded under the previous administration, you assured me that things would be different under yours.
They are not, of course, at least not substantially. The tone and the rhetoric may have changed, but Guantanamo Bay is still a stain on our national honor, your Justice Department still supports preventative (i.e. baseless) detentions, the Orwellian Patriot Act remains law, domestic spying has actually increased, and the TSA continues to condition the public for passivity. I could go on, but the point is that until now I forgave you all of those things. Unlike most Americans, I understood, because it was within the ambit of my profession, the scope and severity of the economic crisis that confronted you when you took office. I also understood that you were taken aback by the virulence of the irrational, often racist reaction to your presidency, by the incoherence of the Tea Party, by the sheer stupidity of the "birther" movement. I could appreciate that you did not want to give ammunition to these opponents by appearing weak on matters of national security, and that economic circumstances had limited how aggressive you could be in addressing the worst abuses of the Bush Administration. That's why I defended you to my progressive friends, who are among those supporters you have bizarrely accused of "whining."
But no more, sir, not while you sit silently watching as America becomes a police state. And no, that is not an exaggeration. Turn off the audio and watch a video of the Oakland police raiding Occupy Oakland and then of the Egyptian military assaulting Tahir Square and see if you can tell the difference. These are shameful incidents, Mr. President, and they set a dangerous precedent for the future. Because of your seeming acquiescence in this abuse I have not yet responded to the almost daily pleas for contributions that I receive from your campaign by text and email, and I am uncertain whether I ever will. Even more, I have persuaded myself that aside from being a shameless panderer, Mitt Romney wouldn't be an awful president, and that his election might actually enhance the prospects for Democratic control of Congress. Simply stated, that is not the mindset you want people like me to have as we approach the election season.
You don't have to do much to address these concerns, you know. You don't have to make a speech or visit an OWS camp, though it would be very powerful if you did. All you really have to do is to ask your Justice Department to open an inquiry into whether one or more of the pepper-spray incidents constituted excessive force, and whether the Bloomberg administration's press restrictions were unconstitutional. Regardless of the outcome of those investigations, simply raising the questions would send a signal to city administrators that their abuses will not go unchallenged, and to your supporters that you actually meant what you once said.
Perhaps that has been your intention all along. Perhaps you have calculated that the more violent and thuggish the local police become the more public sympathy will shift toward the protestors, and that when some magic number has been passed in your internal campaign polling it will be safe for you to say what you have always believed. Perhaps. But that kind of cynical expediency is not what I once supported so fervently, and certainly not what I would support again in 2012. The time to take action is now, Mr. President. It is time to do the right thing.